Computing plays an indispensable role in scientific research. Presently,
researchers in science have different problems, needs, and beliefs about
computation than professional programmers. In order to accelerate the progress
of science, computer scientists must understand these problems, needs, and
beliefs. To this end, this paper presents a survey of scientists from diverse
disciplines, practicing computational science at a doctoral-granting university
with very high research activity. The survey covers many things, among them,
prevalent programming practices within this scientific community, the
importance of computational power in different fields, use of tools to enhance
performance and software productivity, computational resources leveraged, and
prevalence of parallel computation. The results reveal several patterns that
suggest interesting avenues to bridge the gap between scientific researchers
and programming tools developers.